It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in order to succeed, a business must study the habits, desires, and behavior of its customers. For companies conducting business over the Internet and the World Wide Web (“Web” or “WWW”), this necessarily extends to examining and measuring their customers' interaction with their Web sites.
Commercial software currently exists to perform this analysis at the page navigation level. Such software allows companies to track and analyze such information as total traffic to a particular Web page, advertising revenue, and referral visits. However, current software tracking tools do not provide user interface (“UI”) designers and marketing personnel the ability to study the users' interaction within a single Web page. Specifically, current software does not permit the analysis of how a single user interacts with a particular Web page. For example, a company may wish to know how a user interacts with the location of specific content of the Web page so that it can optimize it's placement. Presently, for companies to receive this kind of feedback from a potential user, companies must conduct experiments with test subjects in controlled environments. Typically, a human observer is utilized to physically observe and record a user's interaction with a Web page. Experimental testing such as this is expensive and may lead to less than accurate results, which are unacceptable in today's business environment.
Therefore, in light of these deficiencies, there is a need for a method and apparatus for tracking a user'interaction with a single resource, such as a Web page, or multiple resources, such as Web sites. There is a further need for a method and system for tracking a user's interaction with a single or multiple resources that can provide an extremely accurate and inexpensive analysis of said interaction.